In a World of Festival Clones, Pickathon Stands Apart

I’m having trouble getting from Pickathon’s Galaxy Barn to its iconic Woods stage. The direction is clear. But along with sights like a group of talented kids busking in a clearing and eye-catching art installations, the path itself is lined with brambles laden with the juiciest, most delicious blackberries I’ve ever tasted. The going is slow.

But the destination is worth picking up the pace. Crafted from fallen branches scattered on the 80-acre property to create a magical backdrop, the Woods stage serves as the perfect venue for laid-back country folk of the Rose City Band, the sun-drenched music playing nicely with the filtered light coming through the dense pine forest. The audience sits in a clearing shaded by the canopy above, where a red-breasted sapsucker hunts for insects in the tops of Douglas Firs. The lone bird adds its chips to the five-piece band whose name is a nod to their—and the festival’s—Portland, Ore. home.

Hundreds of music festivals have been taking place all across America this summer, and most of them share a similar model and a similar lineup, as the same collection of bands tours from one to another. Pickathon is not among them.

Now in its 25th year, the festival began small and somewhat counterintuitive, as a way to celebrate music that crossed genre boundary lines at a time when most music festivals catered to one specific type of music. “It was actually kind of a curse early on,” admits founder Zale Shoenborn, a Kentucky native who’s made Portland his home for most of his adult life. “Genre festivals were really big and they brought built-in audiences.”

Even the artists weren’t immune to the blackberries’ call.

But Pickathon hasn’t ever really played by anyone else’s rules. In 2006, the festival moved to an undeveloped piece of land on Pendarvis Farm, just southeast of Portland in the quickly growing community of Happy Valley. Shoenborn and his team turned the challenge of a blank slate into an opportunity to create something new in the forest, and coming out of Covid, built on that with each stage becoming part of a “neighborhood,” designed anew each year by teams of local artists and architects.

For the main stage this year ZGF, the firm that redesigned PDX airport with its striking wooden ceilings, gave a similar treatment to “The Paddock” with wooden slat cones rising out of the stage in front of Mount Hood in the distance. The Courtyard welcomes attendees with a giant fish sculpture/tunnel that also serves as a dance floor when the impressive light display illuminates the Oregon nights. The Coyote neighborhood is forest playground for families and kids, providing a chance for local teens to take the stage. The Cherry Hill, Windmill, Grove and Woods stages all present different backdrop designs of wood and cloth for live music and DJ sets between bands. And the Refuge offers dozens of different healing massage sessions, along with havens for rest and meditation.

There’s comedy in the Lucky Barn and author readings on the Windmill stage. At an outdoor oasis for dining called Curation, attendees can buy tickets to a dinner from a celebrated local chef, along with an intimate set from one of the artists—ours involved Bonnie Morales of the James Beard-nominated Kachka, which serves Eastern Bloc dishes, paired with Australian jazz-funk experimentalists Surprise Chef.

Surprise Chef plays the Curation stage.

But the heart of the festival is music discovery, as Shoenborn explains. “So the curation part of it—it’s not the algorithm thing, it’s not just looking at who are the draws. It’s looking at ‘who are the people who come every year going to just fall in love with in’ bands?”